Contribution
My Lords, I hugely enjoyed sitting on the committee with the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. In fact, as he pointed out, many of his views were a revelation to me; they are ones with which I wholeheartedly agree.
I am going to speak up in favour of older Members of this House remaining here. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, and congratulate her on chairing the committee in the way she did, and I thank our excellent clerks.
Some of your Lordships may be wondering how I can square what I have just said about older Members of the House with support for this committee report. We had many discussions and we consulted widely in the House. We came up with the scheme outlined in the report. It has its flaws but it fulfils what was set out in our terms of reference. However—this is the point—at its heart lies a lacuna that we were unable to bridge; namely, what is the justification for this desire to expel so many Members of the House? You can look at the Labour Party’s manifesto—much has been made of that—but it provides no explanation either.
I therefore hope that when the Leader of the House winds up, she might spend just a couple of sentences answering the question: what problem was the Labour Party trying to solve in its manifesto? Was it the overall size of the House, perhaps? There are many different ways of dealing with the problem of the size of the House. Is it that older Members have lost cognitive ability to be able to continue in the House? There must be other ways of dealing with that. I therefore ask again: what is the Government’s motivation and objective? It would be very helpful to allow us to know; otherwise, there is this suspicion, which some people have mentioned, that the Government want to remove older Members of the House and replace them with new, younger supporters. That does not help us at all on numbers.
As the noble Baroness reminded us, paragraph 51 tells us that the average age of joining the House is 59, and the average age of retiring from the House is 82. I wonder to what extent there is a real problem if those who wish to leave already do so at the age of roughly 82.
Ever since I have been here I have always been below the average age, and it may surprise some noble Lords to know that I still am. But I have always held the elder Members of the House in great admiration. I think of Lord Callaghan, the former Prime Minister, who died in his 90s. In the 1980s, he moved an amendment to a Conservative Bill, which preserved the right of Great Ormond Street Hospital to claim its royalties from JM Barrie’s “Peter Pan”. He had the authority, the political clout and the will to get it done. Under these proposals he would be turfed out, and we would miss him.
I look over at the other side and I see the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who are so important. Sadly, I do not see the noble Lord, Lord Reid, but he is an old friend of mine and I am a great admirer of his. All of them would be turfed out. Of course, none of them needs to stay; they can retire voluntarily, which I think is very much the way forward.
We lose so much knowledge, experience and wisdom by expelling these Peers. In addition, constitutionally, I am not sure it really stacks up. If we have to remove Peers from this House, surely we must reform the way for new entrants to come into this House; otherwise, it is just a free-for-all for the Government, whoever that Government are.
The committee’s report has produced some very useful statistics and commentary on the work of the House. This is extremely useful and revealing, and some good suggestions lie within it. However, having done the work, I suggest respectfully to the noble Baroness and to the Government that they should perhaps think again about what is proposed. We have a new Prime Minister with his own agenda, and we have plenty of work to be getting on with over the next few years. My advice to the Government is to park this in the slow lane. There is nothing to be gained from pressing on with it.